Seconds later, Neil was at the pipe and saw that there were indeed bars across it. Quickly he yanked off the fins and the mask, dug through the pack for a previously prepared C4 charge and pressed it into position on the top and bottom of two of the bars.
He then moved around to the other side of the pipe, prayed that the C4 wouldn’t just blow the entire thing to smithereens and him with it, covered his ears and pressed the detonator.
The explosion sent a shockwave through him and it felt as though he was pushed and pulled in two different directions. He was still lying there in the mud next to the pipe when the gunner in the guard tower opened up with his M240.
He was firing blind, but still his aim was ridiculously on mark. Bullets smacked into the pipe, whining off its rounded cement surface. They withered the air above Neil’s head, then slapped into the mud by his feet and danced across the water.
Guards all up and down the river were blasting into the fog as if they were being attacked by a marine regiment. Neil found himself pinned down, unable to move due to the volume of shooting. It was staggering in its ferocity.
Eventually he knew he would be struck either by a ricocheting bullet or through a lucky hit by one of the guards. And he was thinking about crawling toward the open end of the pipe when Jillybean unleashed the second distraction. The three vest-wearing zombies she had chained to the outer fence were carrying thirty pounds of C4 a piece.
When Jillybean hit the detonator, the zombies evaporated in a great triple explosion: WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
Seventy yards of fence went with them as well. The plan was to detonate the bombs just ahead of the zombie army. There was a second fence twenty yards further in that had probably been damaged by the first explosion and yet, in true Jillybean fashion, she wasn’t going to take the chance.
Mixed in with the forefront of the zombie army were the three other “unchained” monster drones, each with a glow-stick tied into their hair. To monitor them, Jillybean had one of the flying drones up by then.
Neil foolishly glanced upward and of course saw only smoke. “Stupid,” he muttered. The word sounded, in his concussed ears, as if he had spoken it into a tin can. He worked his jaw around hearing an odd clicking and it was then that he noticed that the firing around him had slacked enough for him to try to crawl into the pipe.
The C4 had fractured the cement and had taken out three bars instead of two. Neil crawled through the debris in the three foot pipe, only remembering his flashlight after he was thirty feet into the tunnel.
He also remembered his radio. He stuck the wired ear-bud in and then yelled: “Jillybean! Jillybean! Are you there? I’m in the pipe.”
“Cat, this is mouse. I copy that. Please use our code-names, okay? over.”
“Oh, right. Sorry about that. When will you have eyes up? I’m worried…” Two tremendous but distant explosions puffed the air in and out of the pipe as if a giant was sucking on the end of it like it was a cigarette. “Jil…I mean Mouse. Was that you?”
There was a second of delay before she came on with a curt: “Yes.” The way she said the one terse word, it was clear she wanted to add: who else would it have been? “I’ll have eyes on your location in two mins. out.”
That was Neil’s cue to hurry. He had to get to the fourth manhole cover before her helicopter drone did. Because the drones had such a limited battery life, seconds counted. Neil huffed down the wet pipe going on his hands and knees as fast as he could, but still she beat him by about twenty seconds.
“It’s clear! It’s clear!” she cried through the radio. “But you better hurry. People are coming from the execution site on the run.”
Neil redoubled his efforts, going as fast as he could and wishing he had thought about knee pads. He was cringing by the time he got to the fourth cover. He scrambled onto his side to get the hand-sledge out of the pack and when he did, he smashed it upwards with both hands. It made a sound like a lead gong as one end of the cover jumped up a tiny bit. Without hesitation, he struck it twice more, loosening it. With a deep breath, he gathered himself beneath the cover and thrust upwards.
It was ridiculously heavy, far more so than he had expected. With his frame of reference only what he had seen in movies, he was quite unprepared for the hundred and ten pounds that the cover weighed. Straining with all his might, he was able to move it halfway off before he gave up and scrambled out.
“Go to your right!” Jillybean’s voice crackled through the earbud attached to the radio.
A secret agent with nerves of steel would have slid to the right without hesitation. Neil was just a normal, if not timid guy. His first impulse was to look at the radio in his left hand; his next was to glance upwards to see whether the drone was really there and not hovering over some random stranger. Only when Jillybean begged: “To your right, please,” did he move, ducking behind a van parked on the side of the road.
A moment later, five armed men raced past; in the dark, none of them noticed the partially open manhole cover.
“My batteries are running down,” Jillybean said. “I have another drone on the way, but it’ll be a minute before I can link up with you. Just stay where you are.”
“No. Find Grey and direct me to him. I’ll be fine on my own.”
She hesitated a moment before giving him an “A-firmative. There’s gonna be a ‘splosion up ahead. That’s just me. I don’t wanna waste a perfectly good bomb.”
He had been hurrying in the direction of the outdoor arena, but now he slowed and once more glanced upwards, scanning the dark sky for a drone that was difficult to see in the bright light of day. His head was still up and his eyes straining when there came another explosion—this one just two blocks away. The light of it was a strobe that showed people going in every direction.
The thunder of the explosion rolled over the base, but it was quickly drowned out by screams that echoed up and down the streets. Neil found himself drawn to the site of the explosion. In the dark the blood looked black. The strewn bodies and parts of bodies were chilling the way they just lay there, looking extremely white as if they were made from fish belly and not flesh.
Some of the fleeing people stopped to help the crying wounded, but many others simply ran around the dark pools and the bodies and the mewling creatures crawling here and there.
Neil’s first impulse was to help, but he forced himself away. He had to remind himself that these weren’t just helpless civilians caught in the crossfire of war, these were his enemies. These were vile humans, who, up until three minutes before, had been cheering the torturous murder of his friend.
He ducked around the next block, hoping to skirt around the scene, and ran straight into a pair of men, both of whom had grim faces of chiseled shadow. One shone a light into Neil’s eyes as the other demanded: “Who the hell are you?”
They were fierce and hard soldier-types and Neil had to wonder what he looked like to them in his shredded up and mud-soaked “monster” clothes; a bedraggled rat of a man, probably. Then he wondered what they were expecting from their enemies. If it was Neil under attack, his mind would immediately conjure up images of hardy, virile, special forces operatives, able to kill in a blink. Pretty much the opposite of Neil.
The only question: were the two men hampered by the same paradigm?
As the two men had drawn pistols, while Neil’s weapon was still across his shoulders, he decided to gamble on human nature. In a blink, he changed his look from shocked surprise to cringing and miserable.
“There was a bomb!” he practically screamed as he pointed vaguely away. “There was a bomb and blood and people screaming. It was right there. It…it almost got me, I think. I was right there and then suddenly there was a flash and…”
“You look fine,” one of the men growled, as the pair pushed past Neil. “Get to your battle station.”
They bought it! Neil thought, relief sweeping him. In order to reinforce the paradigm, he whined: “What is it? Are we under attack? Are we under attack
? Is that what all that shooting is?”
They didn’t answer, they just ran off into the dark as another explosion thundered in the direction of where the zombie army was sweeping onto the base.
Neil turned in the opposite direction, heading south, dodging people running in the dark. He had gone only a few blocks when Jillybean came over the radio: “They’re on the highway! They just passed Middle Street. Where are you?”
“Sprigg Street,” Neil said and began running, pulling his M4 from his back. “How many are with him?”
“Thirteen.”
Thirteen! He felt like screaming the word. This impulse was followed up by the very rational mental question: How on earth am I going to take on thirteen trained soldiers?
No answer came to him. His realistic mind couldn’t even throw out the word: luck. If he lived through a minute of the coming fight, he’d count himself lucky. If he lived through two minutes, it would be a miracle. However, it would be downright impossible to actually be victorious against these odds. Even Captain Grey in his prime couldn’t have done it.
The only person Neil thought had any chance was Jillybean and she was half a mile away…sort of.
“Okay, Cat, I have you on screen. Hang a right on Jefferson. There you go. If you hurry, you can catch them before they get to those buildings up ahead. They are on Ash and they’ll pass you on the west.”
Neil raced past stragglers and soldiers and men leading women on chains. He couldn’t worry about them. The fact that they weren’t hurrying to where two different “gun battles” were going on suggested that they were cowards. They would run when Neil started shooting.
After a hundred and thirty yard sprint, Neil was out of breath as he got to buildings which had been the headquarters for a company called Southeast Missouri Builders Supply Co. There were three warehouses and a single story run of office suites. Neil slipped up to the largest of the warehouses; it was a rectangle that butted up against Ash Street.
A glance down the road showed a group heading his way. At first it was hard to tell who was who, but as they drew closer the tactical situation firmed up: two guards, armed with what looked like M16s, walked in front of the main group, preceding them by twenty yards; two more guards were in the back, just fifteen feet from the group; two were on the right side of the road and two were on the left.
In the middle was the River King, screaming into a two-way radio. Next to him was the executioner, leading a bleeding and dazed, looking Captain Grey by a chain, and two more men, both of whom openly carried pistols.
Neil ducked back into the shadows of the warehouse, dug out his fancy scope and fumbled it into place as the men hurried past. Trying to remember everything Grey had ever taught him, Neil thumbed his weapon to fire and peered into the scope seeing a line of red-lasered light stretching out to prick the guard on the furthest right—he was close to a doorway and if he didn’t go down first, he’d just duck into it.
A breath went in and Neil held it, his finger on the trigger. Once again, a part of him knew he should have been pissing his pants in fear, but that part had pissed too many pants and the feeling had grown thin.
A pull of the trigger and the gun jumped in his hands. He was partially deafened by the sound as well as partially blinded by the sudden piercing white bloom in the scope, but that didn’t stop him from shifting the M4 slightly to the left and firing three times, hoping that he was on target.
Normally, he would have ducked back behind the building where it was “safe,” but when the odds were thirteen to one, there was no such thing as safe. Instead of ducking, he shifted the weapon even further left. This time, however, he waited for the scope to clear enough for him to fire.
It was a pause of only a second and a half, but in that time his enemies were falling all over themselves in an attempt to present less of a target. They also began shooting, but if they were shooting at Neil they weren’t good shots. Neil had been shot at before and could tell that the whisper of the passing lead wasn’t within five feet of him.
That second and a half of being exposed felt like five minutes, but finally the scope cleared enough to show him the two men on the left scrambling to get over a low fence. Neil fired and knew he hit the first man, however the scope blared white and he couldn’t be certain where his next four shots went, but there was a cry, followed by an entire barrage that had Neil leaping back behind the corner of the building.
It was aluminum sided and the sound of the bullets smacking into the metal was like the loudest hail that Neil had ever heard. It almost drowned out Jillybean who was saying: “…circling around the building trying to get behind you.”
For a moment, he felt the normal panic that he was used to, and he spun expecting to see a bad guy creeping around the far corner. But there was no one and there couldn’t have been anyone. The building was too large for someone to try to “zip” around it in three seconds.
Neil ran for the far corner while behind him the guards were firing like mad, turning the edge of the warehouse he had just abandoned into Swiss cheese.
In seconds, he was at the corner. When he peeked around the edge, he saw nothing. The shadows here were too intense. Hoping that his own shadows were equally dark, Neil brought up the rifle and slid partially around the corner.
The guard showed up as a lighter shadow, greyish, with glowing eyes. He had his weapon up but he wasn’t sighting along it’s iron sights. Neil could kill him easily—if only he could control his breathing. He wasn’t afraid, but no one had told his body.
His breath was going in and out as if he had run a hundred yard dash, which he had not thirty seconds before. And his hands were shaking with excess adrenaline, making the sights jitter. He took a deep calming breath, and then another and then he said: “Fuck it,” and fired until his gun clicked empty.
He turned on the spot to go back, but Jillybean said, “No, the other way. They’re trying to leave. You have to cut them off.”
That required more running. Neil took a wide path around the man he had shot at in the back of the building, keeping his gun pointed at the body, which moved only an arm, groping in the dark, perhaps for a lost weapon, perhaps trying to find the life leaking out of him.
Only when he was past did Neil run for the end of the building, his pack clinking on his back, reminding him that there were extra magazines in the pack—and that he was empty. “Oh, jeeze,” he whispered and dug out two magazines; one went into his gun, the other into his coat pocket for easy access.
When he got to the next edge of the building, Jillybean said: “Throw a grenade into the street, just make sure to lollypop it so it doesn’t go over.”
“A grenade? Give me a second.”
“You don’t have a grenade?” she hissed. “Neil, what are you doing? This is real serious.” It was weird to be guilted by a seven-year-old and he found himself grinding his teeth as he fished about in the pack for a grenade. Before he could find one, Jillybean said. “I’ve got this. Don’t get too close.”
Knowing what sort of bombs she possessed, Neil dropped to the ground and covered his ears just as the night turned white then orange, then a Halloween color that was the stuff of nightmares.
“Go!” she cried into the radio, not realizing that his ears were ringing as if someone had stuck his head into a garbage can and then beat it with a baseball bat. She was right to tell him to move in. The River King’s men had to be feeling it worse than Neil. They had to be thinking that the attacks were coming from every direction.
Neil dragged himself forward, the scope clear at his eye. Clear but jittering as he came up to the street. He almost didn’t need it. There was a fire in the weeds on the side of the road that lit the street enough for Neil to see the bodies. There were three of them, mangled and ripped apart.
And the others were sprawled in a clump next to the side of the warehouse.
Who was who? Neil looked from shadowed body to shadowed body, uncertain what he was seeing. There was gore and guts
and blood strewn like party streamers and the living were so drenched in it all that Neil couldn’t tell friend from foe.
One of the retched chum-covered beings fired a pistol at him. The man’s pistol wavered uncertainly in his hand and his shots went high and wide. Still, Neil jumped back, using the building as cover.
“They’re getting up,” Jillybean said. “They’re…they’re…one just ran west. Now they’re all going west.”
Neil rushed around the side of the building, ran across the street, and paused at the fence. His hands were full: gun in one, grenade in the other. He began to shove the grenade away when someone started shooting at him from behind.
It was one of the guards he had thought he had killed. Neil dropped down into the gutter and fired blindly in the general direction of his attacker as more bullets came his way, passing uncomfortably close, flying inches over his head.
The two traded a few more shots before they both realized they were at an impasse. Twenty-five feet and a gentle hump in the road separated them, but since they were both in the gutters neither had a good angle and the bullets passed harmlessly by. Neil lifted his M4 to give him the required angle to shoot but before he could pull the trigger, a bullet smashed into the side of his gun.
The impact zinged through the metal so that it felt like an electric shock and the gun toppled out of his hands to thump him on the head. “Ow! Son of a bitch,” Neil swore, feeling both anger and shame—he was sure this sort of thing never happened to Captain Grey.
“You missed me!” Neil cried and then rolled on his side, grabbed the grenade, pulled the pin and tossed it across the street. There was a moment where the night seemed strangely quiet and then there came another head-splitting explosion. It was so close that Neil felt as though he was lifted off the ground.
As debris rained down all around him, he shook his head. There was an echo inside of him that rumbled around his skull, making it difficult to think. Slowly, Neil got up on wobbly legs and glanced at the man who had been shooting at him, but couldn’t see him through the pall of dust and smoke that hung in the air.
The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8 Page 40
